How Your Business Can Survive the 2018 “Facebook Apocalypse”

The sky is falling!

The end is nigh!!

This is #FacebookZERO!!

It’s a Facebook Apocalypse!

Freakouts aside, if you’ve been following all the chaos since Mark Zuckerberg made his announcement about sweeping changes to the News Feed, you might assume that Facebook is no longer a place for businesses. (At least not for free.)

“The days of organic reach are definitely over. Businesses already have to invest in ads on Facebook to get their content in front of their audiences. But there will be fewer opportunities to buy ads, so the prices will be higher.”

Mari Smith added this thought to the conversation:

“Folks, this is a pretty HUGE update today. Sigh. “Facebook Zero,” here we come… it was always on the cards. That is, to see solid ROI on Facebook, businesses must invest in ads. The good news, though, is advertising done properly on Facebook and Instagram can dramatically grow your business.”

“I always balked at past predictions of Facebook’s demise, but this will seriously hurt the company. People will spend less time on Facebook, which will make it less important to marketers who pay for content distribution. Start adjusting your strategy accordingly: prioritize owned media and transfer as much of your audience as you can to your email lists. That way, you’ll have a direct line to them.”

“Thursday’s changes raise questions of whether people may end up seeing more content that reinforces their own ideologies if they end up frequently interacting with posts and videos that reflect the similar views of their friends or family. And bogus news may still spread — if a relative or friend posts a link with an inaccurate news article that is widely commented on, that post will be prominently displayed.”

“Facebook has clearly put a stake in the ground that user experience is more important that the brands that pay them. By making this shift they clearly prioritized one over the other, and are potentially a bit nervous about the current (really negative) narrative about the negative impact of social media on society. Organic reach for business pages on Facebook has been under assault for a long time now, this is not new.”

“Feeds are way too overloaded with too many page likes. Groups are way more effective. You want to play, you pay. And if it becomes cost prohibitive for people to do so, that just means Facebook is prime for disruption, right?”

“I understand, it will be a change for sure, but I don’t think it is such a huge shift that we need to think all doomsday like. Facebook is notorious for this kind of thing. ”

You get the picture.

What Does The Facebook News Feed Change Mean for Your Business?

In reality we don’t know the answer to this exactly — not yet anyway.

You’re probably guaranteed to see lower reach, especially if you aren’t getting much engagement now.

Conversations are Gold

Facebook’s new focus will be on conversations, and primarily conversations between friends.

These comments could be on posts by pages, or by friends so keep that in mind.

So as a page owner you’ll be rewarded when your followers get into threaded comments/conversations on your posts.

There isn’t any mention if just random people that aren’t friends going into long back and forth comments will help your page or not. The focus seems to be on “meaningful interaction” between friends.

As a local business this could be great news as many of your followers will likely be friends, especially in small towns.

Facebook Groups

Some say Facebook Groups will be more important now than ever. And remember you can connect groups to your pages. Closed or Private groups tend to spur on more conversation, as the posts aren’t seen in the News Feed of your friends. So your comments remain hidden to the masses.

Groups would be a great idea for schools, churches, municipalities, non-profits and other local organizations.

If you run a burger joint locally you may not get much traction in a group, although you could use it to maybe give “Exclusive Specials” to those members. Keeping them engaged will be crucial though.

See First

There are many pushing their followers to turn on the “See First” option for their pages. Which is supposed to put the posts into the top of the News Feed if you have it turned on for a page or person.

Social Media Examiner even went so far as to make a quick tutorial video on how to do this, and I’ve seen others do so as well.

Personally I wouldn’t expect many to do this.

Outside of instructional type pages this has little to no value IMHO. But I could be wrong.